For logic-minded Americans still genuinely puzzled as to how it could be that our presidents and secretaries of state and generals and pundits keep hammering home the big lie that Islam has nothing to do with jihad, that the religion of conquest is a "religion of peace," I have a special warning. Such widespread, politics- and mass-media-driven brainwashing is nothing new.

We should stay out of the Sunni-Shia regional war developing in Mesopotamia. Both sides are hostile to Christians and Jews.

Meanwhile, we should secure the borders, halt all immigration and enforce the law: deport the illegals.

These wise words come from an email from Col. Douglas Macgregor (USA ret.), a decorated combat veteran of the first Iraq War and noted military analyst. By this time, a selection of Macgregor's piquant critiques of COIN and the COINdinistas have made their way to this website, beginning in 2010 with the following comment from the famous McChrystal article in The Rolling Stone by the late Michael Hastings.

Soda pop is for sale this week at the University of Maryland under the hammer & sickle, symbol Communism, whose 20th century toll is conservatively estimated at 100 million killed. Not only does the stench of death not follow this murder-cult, the brand lives. Such is the resilience of the Big Lie that still separates the toll of communism from communism itself. The reason we don't see a bottle of Hitlerpop next to the Leninade is because the toll of Nazism has never been separated from Nazism.

This double standard is examined in depth in American Betrayal, as below amid the story of ex-Socialist journalists Eugene Lyons' 1931 lecture tour during which he knowingly witheld from American audiences the truth of the Soviet regime he covered as Moscow bureau chief for United Press.

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. … No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

I'm trying to look on the bright side of what passed for debate over another doomed effort to secure U.S. interests by embarking on the fruitless pursuit, cultivation and empowerment of Islamic "moderates," this time in Syria. We would get better results sending an expeditionary force after the Loch Ness sea monster. No matter. In deliberations resembling a stampede, we heard: The ISIL is coming, the ISIL is coming! Quick, leave our own borders undefended and save Saudi Arabia!

That seemed be the subtext, anyhow, to much talk of Syria. There were odd glimmers of light as when House Appropriations Committee chairman Harold Rogers erupted in candor to say, "They use the term 'moderates.' I don't know a moderate person in Syria." Rogers also gave voice to the ever elusive obvious...

One of the joys of this blog has been to introduce so many people to one man I hold above all in the war on terror Islamofascism radical extremism extremist radicalism IslamoNazism overseas contingency man-caused disasters Islamist terrorism Islamism radical Islamistism.

That man, of course, is the inimitable Abu Qatada.

It all started back in 2003 when Abu Qatada reacted to hearing President George W. Bush declare that Islam was a religion of peace that did not justify violence in any way.

Quoth Qatada:

"I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad or violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Koran?"

Classic.

I've invoked Qatada's words from time to time since. They came back to me lately on hearing the same dreary GWB-style...

It’s 9/11 the 13th, and these United States have never been closer to losing the last vestiges of their foundational identity.

Long ago, our first president, George Washington, prophetically warned against “attachments and entanglements in foreign affairs.” In the last century, such sentiments, tragically (as I increasingly believe), fell into disrepute. In our time, Washington’s 21st-century successors, George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama, have no such compunction. On the contrary, their response to the Islamic assault of 9/11 and the aftermath of continuing jihad have been to link the fortunes of this great nation with those of warring tribes and factions in the Islamic world. That’s about as attached and entangled in foreign affairs as it is possible to get.

For the past 13 years, it has been the flawed crux of U.S. foreign policy to micromanage...

In the "long war" over American Betrayal, History News Network, whose stated mission includes featuring "up to a dozen fresh op-eds by prominent historians" each week, reposted many of the attacks on the book by P.H.'s Radosh and Black, for example, but nothing else. That is, the site reposted none of the many pieces written in praise and/or in defense of the book -- not even by Vladimir Bukovsky, whose work has appeared at HNN, nor by M. Stanton Evans, whose work has been written about...

This week's syndicated column is posted late due to a wonderful trip I took to Charleston, S.C., to speak about American Betrayal at the 71st conference of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons. These doctors are also history buffs, I can personally attest, having signed and sold (out) about 60 books after my talk!

Here is the column, "Countering `Extremism' Will Never Defeat Jihad" (which seems to be okay with our elites):

It's just seven minutes of airtime out of millions since 9/11, but a recent segment of "The Kelly File" on Fox News bears notice. It's as good an example as any of the state of paralysis that still afflicts the public square since jihad struck Manhattan and Washington, D.C., 13 years ago. We have mourned our dead, fought wars, rebuilt cities, but something still is missing. That something is informed talk...

Madam Speaker, actually I was expecting flowers from you. I am celebrating an anniversary these days. Exactly ten years and two days ago, I left a party whose name I cannot immediately remember. During these ten years and two days. I have been much criticized. Most importantly for always saying the same thing.

My critics are right. Indeed, my message had been the same during all these years. And today, I will repeat the same message about Islam again. For the umpteenth time. As I have been doing for ten years and two days.
I have been vilified for my film Fitna. And not just vilified, but even prosecuted. Madam Speaker, while not so many years ago, everyone...

From the vaults, a syndicated column from July 2005. Aside from a couple of minor details, would anyone notice it was nearly a decade old if I ran it tomorrow?

"Wishful Thinking about Islam"

Last week, I outlined the problem of the age: the incompatibility of Islam with a multicultural West that hides away inconvenient history and disturbing doctrine under layers of political correctness. Without stripping them off to examine the problem, all we get is a lot of wishful thinking.

Historian Niall Ferguson, writing in the London Telegraph on the intensifying "Muslim colonization" of Europe, has decided that such "demographic shifts" are not "invariably a bad thing." After all, seven centuries of jihad-imposed dhimmitude for infidels in Muslim Spain gave us the Alhambra,...